Some days, I wake thinking I should really retire, as nearly all my friends and colleagues have done. Part of me knows I’d be hapless in retirement, adrift, insomniac, and ruing my lot in life. But equally dissatisfying is working on a never-ending project at the same time as other projects jostle for room just outside the brain’s door. One such is the 15 Cranes project (see my blog dedicated to that, though it’s been mostly dormant lately, for good reasons). This project was always both an indulgence and a fancy: travel around the world to see all fifteen Crane species and write a book bearing witness to them during our Anthropocene Age, what was I thinking? Where might an audience be? But the project sang hymns to me.
But then the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world and although Australia was a lucky continent that locked down early enough, late last year the prospect of getting to Africa, Asia, northern Asia, Europe, let alone the most dangerous part of the world, the United States of America … that prospect unnerved me and I “parked” the project. Now it calls to me again, even though fluid global travel remains a distant dream, even with vaccines being rolled out. The International Crane Foundation sends out an informative, inspirational newsletter and recently I took it down (in paper form, rare for me) to my cafe and basked in it. Yes, I’d like to resurrect this dream, thank you very much. No, it still makes no sense, but yes, I’ve only got one life and this is one thing I can do. And so on and so forth…
No decision yet.